Putin dismantles ‘naive’ Gorbachev’s legacy of freedom

A theatrical retelling of the life of the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev became a smash hit in Moscow in late 2020, as crowds flocked to attend a play that spoke of a need for freedom and democracy in Russia and an end to authoritarianism.

Gorbachev, by then in his late eighties, watched from the audience as two of the country’s best-known actors played him and his beloved wife Raisa.

Now, following his death this week at the age of 91, the production seems like part of a bygone era. Not just to the heady days of perestroika in the 1980s, when Gorbachev rolled back decades of Soviet repression, but to even recent times before President Vladimir Putin stopped tolerating even the mildest forms of criticism.

The Ukraine invasion has underscored just how far Putin has gone in dismantling Gorbachev’s legacy by reversing the freedoms he introduced — such as freedom of speech and the right to an independent press — and nursing historical grievances about the Soviet collapse.

Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of Moscow political consultancy R.Politik, said that, in Putin’s mind, he was simply correcting Gorbachev’s mistakes.

“Putin thinks Gorbachev was too naive with the west and allowed the Soviet Union to collapse. He thinks a smarter, stronger, tougher geopolitical line could have stopped it,” she added.

He viewed Gorbachev as a “weak politician who could not prevent the ‘catastrophe’”, as Putin described the Soviet Union’s collapse, she explained. “For Putin this is yet another event that shows he is on the right side of history.”

Putin paid his respects on Thursday as Gorbachev lay in state at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, but he will not attend the former leader’s funeral on Saturday due to a scheduling conflict, the Kremlin has said.

Nor will the funeral be a full state affair, while Russia’s international pariah status due to its war of aggression in Ukraine and the difficulty of travelling to Moscow mean no foreign dignities have pledged to make the trip.

Gorbachev, deeply ill in recent months, made no public comments about the war in Ukraine but deplored it privately, his longtime interpreter and a radio editor close to him have said.

Under Putin, however, Russians have lost the freedom to criticise. People who post antiwar messages face years in prison for “discrediting the armed forces”, while celebrities have been driven from the state-funded culture industry or pressured to retract anti-war comments.

The fate of the pair who took the roles of Gorbachev and his wife in the 2020 production underscore this.

Evgeny Mironov, who played Gorbachev, signed a letter opposing the invasion soon after it began. But a few months later, he was visiting Mariupol, the Ukrainian city devastated by the war, in the company of Andrey Turchak, head of Putin’s ruling United Russia party.

Such trips and the publicity around them reinforce the Kremlin’s message that it was a “liberator” rather than destroying and occupying cities while leaving tens of thousands wounded and killed.

The actress who played Raisa, Chulpan Khamatova, has had to leave Russia since the invasion.

Speaking this week from her exile in Latvia, she lauded Gorbachev as a “pacifist” who ended the war in Afghanistan and brought freedoms to the Soviet Union.

For many others in Russia, however, those values make Gorbachev no hero. Instead, he is decried for shredding Russia’s great power status on the global stage, allowing the Soviet Union to collapse, and letting its vast empire be torn apart by allowing the likes of Ukraine to separate from the bloc.

This desire to restore a lost greatness underpins much of the popular support for the Ukraine invasion among the Russian public. Putin has described the war as, in effect, an attempt to reverse Gorbachev’s legacy by returning land lost as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.

Indeed, the freedoms that Gorbachev brought turned many Russians against him, according to Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Leaders who give people freedom are unpopular” in Russia, he said. “People don’t like freedom. They don’t like to use it because it’s difficult [and has] too many risks.” Whereas in an authoritarian system, “you’re told what to do, you’re told what to think and who to vote for . . . It’s very convenient.”

On state media, where the Kremlin’s messaging is beamed to viewers throughout the day, the grudging respect for Gorbachev’s office has barely concealed resentment for his legacy.

“In six years he destroyed our homeland and betrayed the whole socialist camp,” said Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia’s main state television anchors. “Did he realise what he was doing? No, he didn’t.”

But Khamatova insisted the liberties introduced by Gorbachev during the dying days of the Soviet Union could never be truly removed.

“The biggest treasure he gave us is all the freedoms,” she told TV Rain, an independent Russian news station also exiled to Latvia. “Freedom of movement, of speech, of sexual orientation, of religious belief — you can’t take them away. People developed a certain immunity to unfreedom and to lies.”